Now that what I'm talking about

Just got back from Learning 2008. It may be that I'm overdosing on learning conferences, but I found this one particularly bland EXCEPT for the the fact that I spoke with Mr. Kevin Kelly and saw a great presentation from Allison Anderson from Intel. Let talk briefly about both.

My conversation with Kevin Kelly was brief. Essentially the question I had for him was based on an article he wrote that spoke of an economy based on "feeding the web" (This was just a small piece of the article). To simplify this, think of feeding the web as the economy of open source. My question was what is the evolution of this economy, where is it going and how does an entrepreneur like me take advantage of it. I specifically spoke of some smaller products our company carries and the potential of these in the open source economy. The one critical piece of advice he gave me was, well if you want to see if something is valuable to begin with, give it away. If people still don't take it, even when its free, its probably not all that valuable.

I did also ask him if he felt the semantic web was inevitable. He said it was, but that the project was massive and that who knew when it would come to be. But what was new to me in all of this was not that we need to construct a semntic taxonomy but that the first step is the deconstruction of current content. You see, this is critical in creating structure. In most cases, the creation of structure or semantics requires the deconstuction of information into its atomic level, which is really the step that matters most. Once you've done this, you've essentially already figured out what your semantics are going to be.

The other interesting presentation I saw, was by Allison Anderson from Intel. Allison presented a vision of what the typical Intel employee may see on their desktop in the future. It was based on the notion that relevant content in the form of training, connections to other people and experts, project information, etc, would all be dynamically pulled into one's personal environment based on their role in the company and what they were currently working on. Well if this isn't the actualization of how the semantic web and structured content will play out in an organization, then I don't know what is. You see....this is the promise. That the days of constantly reinventing the wheel, figuring out what people need to know, learn, where and how will all be an algorythm based on their transparency to the web! This is the vision I think we should all be looking towards.

It is inevitable!